Navigate Classes

Every quarter at Stanford, thousands of students face the same ritual: they open Explore Courses, stare at a dense wall of filters and text, and then — more often than not — close the tab and text a friend instead.

I know, because I was one of those students.

As a master's student in Learning Design and Technology at Stanford, I lived with the frustration of the old class search system for years. It wasn't just an inconvenience — it was a genuine barrier between students and the academic possibilities available to them. So when I joined the UXDS team at the very beginning of this project, I didn't need convincing that the problem was worth solving. I'd felt it myself.

The project already had a clear mandate: build a modern, student-centered replacement for Explore Courses. Early low-fidelity wireframes existed, but the design work was just beginning. I joined at that moment of possibility.

What I'd experienced personally turned out to be formally documented. In 2021, Stanford's Registrar's Office had commissioned a full discovery project — twelve student interviews, four workshops with forty students, five student personas, and benchmarking across seven peer institutions. The research didn't just surface pain points. It documented, in detail, why the existing system was structurally failing students — and the findings were more serious than a UI problem.

Students were using Explore Courses — they had no choice, because it was the authoritative source of Stanford's class data. But they weren't relying on it to make decisions. Instead, a remarkable thing had happened: students had built their own tools around it. Platforms like Carta and Oncourse had emerged precisely because Explore Courses held valuable data but delivered it in a way that made meaningful exploration nearly impossible. That was a loud signal — when users build their own replacements because the original is too painful to use, the problem runs much deeper than aesthetics.

The fragmentation was the real pain point. The 2021 research mapped exactly how many tools students were maintaining simultaneously: student-built spreadsheet planners, department websites for major requirements, two separate class search tools, a degree progress report, unofficial transcript data, and two enrollment systems — none of which were integrated with each other. To make a single class decision, a student might touch all of them. Students weren't being difficult; they were doing what people always do when a system fails them — they improvised.

What the research also found, and what mattered deeply for the design, was who this fragmentation hurt most. First-generation and low-income (FLI) students — those without upperclassmen networks, family familiarity with university systems, or time to invest in learning workarounds — bore the brunt of it. The broken system wasn't a neutral inconvenience. It systematically advantaged students who were already advantaged. One student put it plainly: "I wanted to explore but in the beginning it was not fun — I was overwhelmed. There were too many choices."

This shaped specific design decisions. A student without a peer network to ask "what's this professor actually like?" gets that answer from the instructor profile page — a dedicated view showing their teaching style, background, and every class they teach. A student who doesn't know which department to start in can search by interest area or topic, rather than needing someone to point them to the right corner of the catalogue. A student without an advisor connection can see degree requirements and grading basis directly in the Snack layer, without navigating away or scheduling a meeting to ask. And a student doing their planning between classes on a phone — because that's the device and the moment they have — gets a mobile experience built as a first-class interaction, not an afterthought. Navigate Classes doesn't require you to already know how Stanford works.

Synthesizing the research led to a different question entirely. The issue wasn't how to make search better — it was about when students interact with class discovery, and how long that process actually lasts.

Class planning at Stanford isn't a single event. Students start weeks before their enrollment window opens, exploring options, vetting possibilities, and adjusting their thinking as new information comes in. When the window opens, they move fast. After enrollment, they continue adjusting — dropping, adding, waitlisting — for weeks afterward. The old system had been designed as a transaction: come in, search, leave. But students experience it as an ongoing, iterative relationship with their schedule across an entire quarter.

That reframe changed the design mandate entirely. We weren't building a better search box. We were building something that could support a student at every stage of that arc — from open-ended exploration early in the planning cycle, to confident, fast decision-making when their window opened. Every structural decision that followed came back to this: what does this student need right now, at this moment in their planning journey?

The anxiety the research documented was inseparable from this. Without a tool that met students where they were across that arc, every interaction with class planning became a high-stakes, under-supported decision. Students defaulted to safe choices — taking classes with friends, sticking to familiar departments — not because they lacked curiosity, but because the system made exploration feel risky. Navigate Classes was designed to make exploration feel safe.

We moved into design with a framework that became the philosophical backbone of the entire platform: Bite, Snack, Meal. The premise is simple but consequential — not every student comes to class discovery in the same state of mind. Some want a fast answer between classes. Others are settling in for a proper Sunday evening planning session. The old Explore Courses treated every visit identically, which meant it served no one particularly well.

After completing the hi-fi prototype in Figma, I conducted usability testing with students online — each round with approximately 10 participants, split between graduate and undergraduate students and deliberately diverse across departments, academic years, and international backgrounds. Sessions were recorded and synthesized using Grain, whose AI-assisted analysis helped identify patterns across participants efficiently. I synthesized all findings into a structured report and presented them to stakeholders across the project team. From there, the team discussed which feedback to act on, and I applied the agreed changes to the design before development handoff.

The critical findings from that first round were instructive. A number of students were unaware of the mega menu, meaning valuable features were going unused because the navigation didn't surface them clearly — identified and resolved before launch. A second finding was that some students wanted reviews and workload data from peers. This is a deliberate information architecture decision driven by authentication requirements: Navigate Classes is a public platform with no login, and surfacing personal or peer-generated data requires authenticated sessions. An authenticated version is on the roadmap for this year — the testing feedback confirmed its direction, not its absence.

The validation findings were equally clear. Students described the interface as "stress-free" — a direct contrast to the anxiety associated with older platforms. The mobile experience was praised as intuitive and well-structured, validating the mobile-first decision at the behavior level. Students who were infrequent users reported increased interest in adopting the platform regularly after a single session.

The most significant structural evolution also came from this round. We'd initially designed recommendations as a separate "For You" section. Students liked it in isolation but kept bouncing between it and the main search view. The insight was simple: discovery and search aren't separate behaviors — they're the same behavior at different moments of intent. We merged both into a unified interface, with recommendations surfacing inline within search results. The logic became invisible infrastructure — present and useful, never demanding its own stage.

Once the platform went live, I ran a second round of usability testing with students on the live product. This ensured findings reflected not just designed intent but built reality — how the product actually behaved under real conditions. Further refinements were applied based on that round and stakeholder discussion.

Feedback doesn't stop at launch. Navigate Classes has an embedded feedback and ticket form that functions as a continuous discovery mechanism — a live channel that constantly surfaces what students are experiencing in the platform. That ongoing signal directly informs what gets prioritized — and this year, the team will be working on new features and building out the authenticated version that will unlock personalized functionality students have been asking for: saved classes, workload insights, peer reviews, and degree progress mapping.

The numbers are clear. In a single week, Navigate Classes recorded 336,000 views and 9,300 active users — both up over 40% from the previous period. The Class Details page alone saw 112,000 views growing at 115.6% — students drilling deep into class information inside the platform rather than leaving for external sources, exactly the behavior Full Content Display was designed to produce. A traffic spike on March 5th aligned with a Stanford enrollment window opening, with users accessing from the US, France, Vietnam, India, the UK, China, and Italy.

These numbers carry additional weight given the context. At the time of testing in spring 2025, Explore Courses was still live in parallel and many students simply didn't know Navigate Classes existed. Awareness — not quality — was the primary adoption barrier. Growing at 40%+ while competing with a deeply habituated institutional tool, with minimal awareness campaigns, is meaningful performance.

The qualitative data reinforces this. Students rated consolidated class information as the platform's most valued aspect, directly validating the core hypothesis. The embedded feedback form keeps that signal live — and what it's pointing toward is already in motion: new features shipping this year, and an authenticated version that will make Navigate Classes not just a place to find classes, but a platform that knows who you are and what you're working toward.